Search Google Appliance

Adding Machines

Ten Keys & Fewer

From the mid-19th century, a few adding machines were built with an array of nine or ten keys for entering digits. The clockmaker Jean-Baptiste Schwilgué patented such a machine in France in 1844. Schilt had worked for Schwilgué before building his machine. He showed the instrument at the Crystal Palace exhibit, a World’s Fair held in London in 1851. Schilt declined to make copies of this machine, and had little immediate influence on the design of adding machines. In the course of the 19th century, inventors like David Carroll of Pennsylvania and the French-born priest Michael Bouchet of Louisville, Kentucky, also proposed adding machines with a limited number of keys. Bouchet seems to have found a handful of customers. Ten-key adding machines devised by rabbi Judah Levin of Detroit and Frank S. Baldwin of New Jersey also found no wide market.

During the 1890s, Albert C. Ludlum of Brooklyn and then Denver, and William W. Hopkins of St. Louis took out patents for a ten-key adding machine that would print results. From 1903 it was manufactured in St. Louis as the Standard adding machine. The Standard was, the first widely distributed ten-key adding machine on which the numbers printed were visible.

The success of the Standard inspired imitators. Inventors at Burroughs Adding Machine Company designed a ten-key adding machine, although it was not marketed. Sydney B. Austin of Baltimore prepared a similar machine. William Hopkins’s younger brother, machinist Hubert Hopkins, patented his own version of a ten-key adding machine. After complex business dealings, including intervention from other adding machine manufacturers, James L. Dalton acquired exclusive rights to manufacture machines under the Hopkins patents. From 1903, a firm soon known as the Dalton Adding Machine Company made the machine in Missouri and then Ohio, until it was acquired by Remington Rand in 1927. Remington Rand would also acquire rights to a lighter ten-key machine, built on patents of Thomas Mehan and originally sold as the Brennan.

Slightly later than Hopkins, Osker Sundstrand of Illinois introduced an adding machine that featured digit keys arranged in a 3 x 3, with a zero bar underneath. This became standard, and would be used not only on adding machines, but on later electronic calculators. In 1926, the Sundstrand Adding Machine Company was acquired by Elliott Fisher, a firm known for its bookkeeping machines. This company, in turn, merged with the Underwood Typewriter Company, which sold the Underwood Sundstrand adding machine for many years. The Italian firm of Olivetti purchased a controlling share of Underwood Corporation in 1959, and soon placed a redesigned ten-key adding machine on the market.

By the mid-20th century, ten-key adding machines took a growing share of the market. Victor Adding Machine Company of Chicago, which had initially sold full-keyboard machines, introduced a ten-key machine in 1939. After World War II, Victor would acquire one of the first manufacturers of full-keyboard machines, Felt & Tarrant. The venerable Burroughs Adding Machine Company also introduced a ten-key machine, patterned on the British Summit. A few ten-key machines were imported from Europe and Japan. Plastic machines with fewer keys and limited capabilities were made in Japan and Hong Kong.

This is the second form of key-driven adding machine patented by Michael Bouchet (1827-1903), a French-born Catholic priest who came to the United States in 1853 and worked in Louisville, Kentucky, from 1860.

Bouchet was of an inventive turn of mind, devising automatic snakes to frighten his acolytes, and a folding bed and fire escape for his own use. He had considerable responsibility for the financial affairs of his diocese and, according to his biographer, as early as the 1860s invented an adding machine to assist in keeping these accounts. Of these devices, Bouchet patented only later versions of the adding machine, taking out patents in 1882 and in 1885.

His machine was used to add single columns of digits. Depressing a key depressed a lever and raised a curved bar with teeth on the inside of it. The teeth on the bar engaged a toothed pinion at the back of the machine, rotating it forward in proportion to the digit entered. A wheel at the left end of the roller turned forward, recording the entry. A pawl and spring then disengaged the curved bar, preventing the roller and recording bar from turning back again once the key was released. Two additional wheels to the left of the first one were used in carrying to the tens and hundreds places, so that the machine could record totals up to 99. Left of the wheels was a lever-driven tack and pinion zeroing mechanism.

This silver-colored example of Bouchet’s machine has a brass base and nine keys with plastic key covers (two of the key covers are missing), arranged in two rows. It is from the collection of computing devices assembled by Dorr E. Felt in the early 20th century It has serial number 229. Compare to 310230.

This is the second form of the key-driven adding machine patented by Michael Bouchet (1827-1903), a French-born Catholic priest who came to the United states in 1853 and worked in Louisville, Kentucky, from 1860. Bouchet was of an inventive turn of mind, devising automatic snakes to frighten his acolytes, and a folding bed and fire escape for his own use. He had considerable responsibility for the financial affairs of his diocese and, according to his biographer, as early as the 1860s invented an adding machine to assist in keeping these accounts. Of these devices, Bouchet patented only later versions of the adding machine, taking out patents in 1882 and in 1885.

The machine added single columns of digits. Depressing a key depressed a lever and raised a curved bar with teeth on the inside of it. The teeth on the bar engaged a toothed pinion at the back of the machine, rotating it forward in proportion to the digit entered. A wheel at the left end of the roller turned forward, recording the entry. A pawl and spring then disengaged the curved bar, preventing the roller and recording bar from turning back again once the key was released. Two additional wheels to the left of the first one were used in carrying to the tens and hundreds places, so that the machine could record totals up to 99. Left of the wheels was a lever-driven tack and pinion zeroing mechanism.

This example of the machine has a tin cover and a brass base and nine key stems arranged in two rows (the keys are missing). It was the gift of Mrs. Joseph S. McCoy, widow of Joseph S. McCoy, Actuary of the U.S. Treasury from 1889 until his death in 1931. McCoy and his predecessor, Ezekial Brown Elliott, were most open to inventions in adding machines. According to one of McCoy’s colleagues, the Bouchet machine was left in the office by the inventor in the year 1890 or thereabouts to be tried out. Bouchet did not return.